aws

DynamoDB is an easy-to-use NoSQL database available only on AWS. It comes with many useful features such:
Time-to-live for items
Secondary indexes
Scalable read and write throughput
Streams that contain all changes of a table
Unfortunately, there is n...

CloudWatch is the most undervalued service on AWS. It’s like an empty control room. All data is there, but no one is looking at it.
Together with IAM and VPC, CloudWatch provides the basis for modern infrastructure. CloudWatch combines an extensive set...

CloudFormation is the standard to provision AWS resources. But developing a template is a lot of work. Let’s speed up development and maintenance by working together on high-quality templates:
reviewed by experts
secure
highly available
scalable
easy to deploy and update
built-in monitoring, logging, and visibility
documented
automatically tested
As a maintainer of Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation, I recently reflected on the project. I came up with the following questions to see how things are go...

Are you still using the Classic Load Balancer - formerly known as Elastic Load Balancer - for distributing incoming requests among a fleet of EC2 Instances? AWS announced the Application Load Balancer, as a new alternative to the Classic Load Balancer i...

marbot forwards alerts from AWS to your DevOps team via Slack. marbot was one of the winners of the AWS Serverless Chatbot Competition in 2016. Today I want to show you how marbot works and what we learned so far.
Let’s start with the architecture diagr...

EC2 Container Service (ECS) and Kubernetes (K8s) are solving the same problem: managing containers across a cluster of hosts. The battle between ECS and Kubernetes reminds me of the editor war between vi and Emacs: heated discussions focusing on technic...

We are happy to announce the filming of our book Amazon Web Services in Action. Our video course AWS in Motion is introducing Amazon’s cloud offerings in more than 3 hours of video lessons and 25 exercises.
Manning has published our online course consi...

AWS first! is one of our consulting principles. Using a managed service provided by AWS is usually offering the most bang for the buck. But there are pitfalls and downsides hidden behind shiny marketing promises of these managed services as well.
Amazon...

I was preparing some AWS Security related training. Soon, I realized that this topic is too huge to fit into my brain. So I structured my thoughts in a mind map1. Within a couple of minutes2 I came up with this:
What is your first reaction? Mine was pr...

Do you want to be faster by using AWS? I see many AWS customers struggling with high expectations and some even slow down. That’s why I wrote the AWS Velocity Series. Let me sum up what matters most when optimizing for speed.
1. Select your runtime envi...

Are you part of a highly motivated DevOps team? Use marbot, a friendly chatbot, to forward all kind of alerts from your AWS infrastructure to Slack. Alerts are escalated across your team automatically allowing you to focus on your daily work.